At the 11th Hour, a Languid Congress

WASHINGTON — Congressional lawmakers will straggle into the Capitol this week for the last legislative days before their long summer recess, crunch time in past Congresses but a sleepy time for the underachieving 113th.

The last week before the August recess is usually full of late nights, last-minute deal-making and achievements to take home to constituents. This week, the House will not even show up until Tuesday evening.

The most pressing business is student loans. Congress is likely to give final approval to legislation that ties student loan interest rates to the market-set rate of Treasury bonds, lowering interest rates at least in the short term.

But the House’s marquee moment before adjourning until Sept. 9 will come on Friday with its 40th vote to cripple President Obama’s health care law. House members preparing their vacation plans have been assured that the last vote will be no later than 3 p.m.

In the Senate, a glimmer of hope has appeared for a bipartisan deal to end the automatic across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration and shift some of those savings to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. But even optimistic negotiators do not suggest that an agreement between Senate Republicans and the White House is in reach before the break.

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, said that meetings on Capitol Hill between a small group of Senate Republicans and Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, gave reason for optimism, but that no agreement was in sight.

“There’s been enough spade work where during Thursday’s meeting, things came into much more focus,” he said.

Speaker John A. Boehner said this month that the 113th Congress should not be judged by the number of laws it passed, but by the number of laws it repealed. But Congresses past — both Republican- and Democratic-controlled — have made substantive achievements in the week before the summer break.

Last year, the Senate moved toward passage of a major cybersecurity bill and extended expiring middle-class tax cuts. The House approved agriculture disaster assistance on Aug. 2, a day after its own tax cut extension bill passed — a prelude to the deal in January that brought the nation back from the “fiscal cliff,” when all of the Bush-era tax cuts were set to expire.

In 2011, with the government staring at its first debt default, Congress approved the Budget Control Act on Aug. 2, which capped discretionary spending for a decade and empowered a special committee to find a broader deficit reduction deal or set off the automatic sequestration cuts now in force.

The Senate confirmed Robert S. Mueller III to a new term as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The House approved compensation for 9/11 rescue workers suffering from health effects.

In 2010, the Senate confirmed Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court on Aug. 5, the same day it gave final passage to a major Federal Aviation Administration and air-traffic control overhaul. Earlier that week, the Senate made progress on a small-business lending program that would become law in September.

In 2009, Congress passed “Cash for Clunkers,” the law that subsidized the purchase of cars and trucks; replenished the highway trust fund; and confirmed Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

It is not as if there is no work to do this year. None of Congress’s 12 annual spending bills have reached Mr. Obama’s desk, and with the House and the Senate far apart on total spending levels, a government shutdown is possible on Oct. 1, when the current spending law expires.

Once Congress returns on Sept. 9, lawmakers will have just nine legislative days until the current fiscal year ends and large swaths of the government would be forced to close.

By early November, Congress must raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit or risk a federal debt default.

House and Senate negotiators have yet to reach agreements on a farm bill, a budget, an immigration law overhaul, or an annual defense policy law. The House has yet to pass legislation reauthorizing the food stamp program after supplemental nutrition assistance was stripped from the House’s version of the farm bill this month.

About a half-dozen Senate Republicans met with Mr. McDonough last week hoping for a deal — grand or small — on future spending. The group appears to be closing in on a modest agreement to replace deep and automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs at Congress’s annual funding discretion with more subtle changes to entitlement — or “mandatory” — programs.

“One of the more sensible things the Senate could do would be to take those discretionary cuts and replace them with mandatory savings,” Mr. Corker said, declining to offer any details about the cuts.

But some basic decisions need to be made, starting with whether to try again for a broader deal to tackle deficit spending long term with significant changes to entitlement programs and more tax revenue.

“There’s been enough back-and-forth, sounding each other out, that there’s enough information to make some decisions: Is it worth doing something different on sequester? I think there’s appetite for that on both sides. Is it worth doing something bigger? I don’t know at this point,” said Mr. Corker, suggesting that lawmakers and the White House would have a better sense of direction by the end of this week.